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Re: Texteroids
- From: Juliusz Chroboczek <jch at pps dot jussieu dot fr>
- To: nwourms at yahoo dot com
- Cc: alanh at fairlite dot demon dot co dot uk, cygwin-xfree at cygwin dot com
- Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 08:21:33 +0200 (CEST)
- Subject: Re: Texteroids
- References: <20020602141335.22053.qmail@web21007.mail.yahoo.com>
Dear Nicholas, dear Alan, dear all,
The server-side DPS code is not part of XFree86 and will most probably
never be.
There are two reasons to that.
One is fundamental. The server-side DPS code uses the Aladdin
Ghostscript interpreter version 6.02, which is not Free software. The
plan was to update it to use GNU Ghostscript 6.50, which is Free
software, but uses a license (the GPL) which makes it unsuitable for
inclusion in XFree86.
The other reason is that the code has a bug. I spent three months of
hard work trying to track it down, and then decided that life is too
short. In short, the interpreter corrupts memory at some point, which
later causes the server to crash.
If anybody feels like trying to trace it down (something that would
make me extremely happy): it is reproducible with GNUstep's
benchmarking code. It is also reproducible in any program that uses
the NeXT transparency extensions.
As long as this bug remains, it is impossible to even think of relying
on the DPS extension.
With most sincere regards,
Juliusz